>Which aspect of late 20th-century life is hardest to explain to a young person? That cars used to rust? That we experienced such a thing as boredom? Or that New York had a conservative mayor?
>True, Rudy Giuliani handed over to another Republican in Michael Bloomberg this side of 2000, but the second man had been and would be again a Democrat. No thoroughgoing rightwinger has run the place for a generation, and Zohran Mamdani extends that trend.
>The same is true of its peer cities. Paris has not had a non-Socialist mayor since 2001. (The centre-right Jacques Chirac once spent 18 years in that office.) Los Angeles has not had a Republican mayor since the same year, despite a tradition of vehement conservatism in some of its suburbs and surrounding counties that goes back to Barry Goldwater’s time.
>In 1987, most British MPs with London constituencies were Conservative. The city swung to Labour as part of Tony Blair’s national landslide a decade later, and never really went back, even as the country reverted to its habitual Conservatism. Yes, Boris Johnson was elected mayor but that was pre-Brexit and many voters chose him as a bohemian diversion. It bears repeating that London wanted Jeremy Corbyn as prime minister: the provinces had to save The Great Wen from itself.
>We should expect big cities to be more liberal than the national average. But the gap used to be modest and therefore no threat to cohesion. Some time around the millennium, it began to widen. Perhaps the fall in crime that started in the 1990s freed urban voters to prioritise issues on which their instincts were more leftwing. Or immigrants reached such a critical mass in cities that conservatives, with their nativist bent, could no longer command a hearing there. Either way, the question now is whether metropolis and hinterland can remain this far apart in worldview without pulling at the stitching of the nation state.
>The more leftwing cities become, the more conservatives define themselves against them, in turn provoking urban counter-movements of the Mamdani kind. The troubling thing is that both sides have a strong case. Conservatives can cite the dystopian downtowns of some US cities as the natural outcome of progressive politics. Those cities might ask why their fiscal surpluses subsidise distant regions that view them as Babels. The very validity of the passions here suggests there is mileage in the rift between the urban and non-urban worlds.
>It is not even a rift that stops at national borders. Sadiq Khan has become a reference point for enemies of multi-culture who live in such famous London boroughs as Palm Beach. Mamdani too might become a global shorthand for an entire brand of progressive politics.
>More autonomy won’t fix the problem. The city-hinterland split exists in countries as centralised as Britain, where the mayoralties are young and fairly weak, but also in federal systems. Even in countries where the historic schism is region versus region rather than metropolis versus non-metropolis, cities stand out. Turin and Milan are centre-left atolls in the sea of northern Italian conservatism. Berlin and to some extent Leipzig are similarly marooned in east Germany. Perhaps this is all tenable. Perhaps I am underestimating the strength of national feeling. I do hope so. Give me the present comfort of a stable country over the pipe dream of breakaway city republics and all the strife these would incur.
>I just wonder if the nation state has known this precise kind of internal stress before. Conservatives have always been able to see a Giuliani in New York or a Richard Riordan in LA and conclude that metropolitan life isn’t so alien. Coastal Democrats could in turn point to a reassuring bloc of like-minded people in the interior. (Tennessee was a blue state in the 1990s.) The subsequent “sorting” of the population into ever more progressive cities and a heartland of entrenched right-wingery — each bidding up the other’s extremism — is a new test for the nation state. Were it going on at a time of central budget surpluses, we could spread those around as a balm. But look at the fiscal numbers. Geographic polarisation and material scarcity: that is what nationhood must withstand.
>For all their jibes at Marx and Fukuyama, conservatives have a teleology of their own, in which the nation state is the final word in large-scale human organisation. Why should it be? The multinational empire has more historical pedigree. So does the city state. Even some of the most successful countries had to consolidate themselves through civil war.
>No one foresees that, but the trend is ominous regardless. The gilets jaunes were an anti-metropolitan movement. A similar spirit infused Washington on January 6 2021. Rural protests disturbed various capitals last year. At best, these two worlds will become strangers to each other. If a conservative-run New York seems remote history, remember that John Major entered 10 Downing Street via a seat on Lambeth council. Would a Tory even think to attempt that route now? One hope for the nation state, I suppose, is that cities and provinces stop short of conflict and settle for mutual incomprehension.
>
Al_787 on
As much as anyone, including me, is skeptical about religion, it was a hugely important institution of organizing morality. Tocqueville *had* the right praises for religion in America, it tempered democratic passion, restrained the love for material well-being, and guided individualism towards the right conclusions. In doing that, it stayed out of politics, avoided building opulent churches, and shed medieval rituals. There was this majority’s power over opinion he talked about in America, so all-encompassing no one dares going against it. I don’t think that exists anymore, since you can just relocate for a different moral environment.
I think this is hugely important to the urban-rural divide. Boston was extremely Catholic in the early 2000s, not quite anymore. Searching back into popular culture and San Francisco was the first place in America where there’s this idea of a liberal escape. LGBTQ+ people flocked there in the midst of extreme intolerance, trumped up in large parts by America’s most famous religious figures.
Since then churches have waded more and more into politics, while scandals like pedophilia and egregious practices tainted their reputation. Cities start abandoning religion in wholesale fashion, searching for constant social progressivism as the morality of the new day. Meanwhile, it is not so easy for them to lose their grip as the social organizing force in rural America. And now pushed into a corner of its own they become more and more fanatic or conservative, suddenly every kid at 18 who finds themselves slightly liberal feels the need to flee. And yes, popular culture romanticizes this phenomenon. Now every big city is San Francisco.
Party-Benefit5112 on
Athens’ last mayor was center-right and Thessaloniki (second biggest city in Greece) has been run by conservatives for the most part. Madrid and Berlin also have center-right mayors iirc. Obviously, cities are more progressive but that doesn’t mean the right can’t win. They just need to run centrist candidates and focus crime, good governance etc instead of culture war bs. The article calls Boris Johnson a diversion but he did manage to get elected even with the most diverse electorate in Europe. The reason conservatives lost London is because they went insane after Brexit.
vaguelydad on
It’s just luxury beliefs though, right? Functionally the anti-abundance progressivism policies Mamdami supports are regressive:
Rent control- enables discrimination, helps a few lucky winners hurts overall affordability by degrading development and maintenance.
Public Housing- historically used in a regressive way to isolate the poor into crime ridden ghettos where the middle and upper classes won’t have to deal with them
Police budget cuts- the rich pay for private security, the poor get brutalized.
Extremely high minimum wage – makes it illegal to employ the low skill and enables discrimination against the marginalized.
No fare public transit- paired with police cuts, leads to degradation of transit quality as it is overrun by homeless drug addicts while the rich use Uber
Universal childcare – can be done well but is primarily a rich person concern. The poor family making $30k per year each at their jobs might as well have a home parent for their 3 kids under 5. They mostly want cash. It’s high income people who really want the labor intensive childcare required for the 0-5 gap in government childcare provision. That’s why the proposal emphasizes universal.
YeetThermometer on
This is a bit of a mid-read. New Yorkers didn’t point to Fritz Hollings or Ben Nelson and think “hey, they really get us out there!” As long as there has been city and country, one has been suspicious of the other. How that shakes out in two party coalitions is particular to the situation.
Lmaoboobs on
For every mamdani on the left there is 1000 regressive and virulently reactionary rural mayors.
6 Comments
>Which aspect of late 20th-century life is hardest to explain to a young person? That cars used to rust? That we experienced such a thing as boredom? Or that New York had a conservative mayor?
>True, Rudy Giuliani handed over to another Republican in Michael Bloomberg this side of 2000, but the second man had been and would be again a Democrat. No thoroughgoing rightwinger has run the place for a generation, and Zohran Mamdani extends that trend.
>The same is true of its peer cities. Paris has not had a non-Socialist mayor since 2001. (The centre-right Jacques Chirac once spent 18 years in that office.) Los Angeles has not had a Republican mayor since the same year, despite a tradition of vehement conservatism in some of its suburbs and surrounding counties that goes back to Barry Goldwater’s time.
>In 1987, most British MPs with London constituencies were Conservative. The city swung to Labour as part of Tony Blair’s national landslide a decade later, and never really went back, even as the country reverted to its habitual Conservatism. Yes, Boris Johnson was elected mayor but that was pre-Brexit and many voters chose him as a bohemian diversion. It bears repeating that London wanted Jeremy Corbyn as prime minister: the provinces had to save The Great Wen from itself.
>We should expect big cities to be more liberal than the national average. But the gap used to be modest and therefore no threat to cohesion. Some time around the millennium, it began to widen. Perhaps the fall in crime that started in the 1990s freed urban voters to prioritise issues on which their instincts were more leftwing. Or immigrants reached such a critical mass in cities that conservatives, with their nativist bent, could no longer command a hearing there. Either way, the question now is whether metropolis and hinterland can remain this far apart in worldview without pulling at the stitching of the nation state.
>The more leftwing cities become, the more conservatives define themselves against them, in turn provoking urban counter-movements of the Mamdani kind. The troubling thing is that both sides have a strong case. Conservatives can cite the dystopian downtowns of some US cities as the natural outcome of progressive politics. Those cities might ask why their fiscal surpluses subsidise distant regions that view them as Babels. The very validity of the passions here suggests there is mileage in the rift between the urban and non-urban worlds.
>It is not even a rift that stops at national borders. Sadiq Khan has become a reference point for enemies of multi-culture who live in such famous London boroughs as Palm Beach. Mamdani too might become a global shorthand for an entire brand of progressive politics.
>More autonomy won’t fix the problem. The city-hinterland split exists in countries as centralised as Britain, where the mayoralties are young and fairly weak, but also in federal systems. Even in countries where the historic schism is region versus region rather than metropolis versus non-metropolis, cities stand out. Turin and Milan are centre-left atolls in the sea of northern Italian conservatism. Berlin and to some extent Leipzig are similarly marooned in east Germany. Perhaps this is all tenable. Perhaps I am underestimating the strength of national feeling. I do hope so. Give me the present comfort of a stable country over the pipe dream of breakaway city republics and all the strife these would incur.
>I just wonder if the nation state has known this precise kind of internal stress before. Conservatives have always been able to see a Giuliani in New York or a Richard Riordan in LA and conclude that metropolitan life isn’t so alien. Coastal Democrats could in turn point to a reassuring bloc of like-minded people in the interior. (Tennessee was a blue state in the 1990s.) The subsequent “sorting” of the population into ever more progressive cities and a heartland of entrenched right-wingery — each bidding up the other’s extremism — is a new test for the nation state. Were it going on at a time of central budget surpluses, we could spread those around as a balm. But look at the fiscal numbers. Geographic polarisation and material scarcity: that is what nationhood must withstand.
>For all their jibes at Marx and Fukuyama, conservatives have a teleology of their own, in which the nation state is the final word in large-scale human organisation. Why should it be? The multinational empire has more historical pedigree. So does the city state. Even some of the most successful countries had to consolidate themselves through civil war.
>No one foresees that, but the trend is ominous regardless. The gilets jaunes were an anti-metropolitan movement. A similar spirit infused Washington on January 6 2021. Rural protests disturbed various capitals last year. At best, these two worlds will become strangers to each other. If a conservative-run New York seems remote history, remember that John Major entered 10 Downing Street via a seat on Lambeth council. Would a Tory even think to attempt that route now? One hope for the nation state, I suppose, is that cities and provinces stop short of conflict and settle for mutual incomprehension.
>
As much as anyone, including me, is skeptical about religion, it was a hugely important institution of organizing morality. Tocqueville *had* the right praises for religion in America, it tempered democratic passion, restrained the love for material well-being, and guided individualism towards the right conclusions. In doing that, it stayed out of politics, avoided building opulent churches, and shed medieval rituals. There was this majority’s power over opinion he talked about in America, so all-encompassing no one dares going against it. I don’t think that exists anymore, since you can just relocate for a different moral environment.
I think this is hugely important to the urban-rural divide. Boston was extremely Catholic in the early 2000s, not quite anymore. Searching back into popular culture and San Francisco was the first place in America where there’s this idea of a liberal escape. LGBTQ+ people flocked there in the midst of extreme intolerance, trumped up in large parts by America’s most famous religious figures.
Since then churches have waded more and more into politics, while scandals like pedophilia and egregious practices tainted their reputation. Cities start abandoning religion in wholesale fashion, searching for constant social progressivism as the morality of the new day. Meanwhile, it is not so easy for them to lose their grip as the social organizing force in rural America. And now pushed into a corner of its own they become more and more fanatic or conservative, suddenly every kid at 18 who finds themselves slightly liberal feels the need to flee. And yes, popular culture romanticizes this phenomenon. Now every big city is San Francisco.
Athens’ last mayor was center-right and Thessaloniki (second biggest city in Greece) has been run by conservatives for the most part. Madrid and Berlin also have center-right mayors iirc. Obviously, cities are more progressive but that doesn’t mean the right can’t win. They just need to run centrist candidates and focus crime, good governance etc instead of culture war bs. The article calls Boris Johnson a diversion but he did manage to get elected even with the most diverse electorate in Europe. The reason conservatives lost London is because they went insane after Brexit.
It’s just luxury beliefs though, right? Functionally the anti-abundance progressivism policies Mamdami supports are regressive:
Rent control- enables discrimination, helps a few lucky winners hurts overall affordability by degrading development and maintenance.
Public Housing- historically used in a regressive way to isolate the poor into crime ridden ghettos where the middle and upper classes won’t have to deal with them
Police budget cuts- the rich pay for private security, the poor get brutalized.
Extremely high minimum wage – makes it illegal to employ the low skill and enables discrimination against the marginalized.
No fare public transit- paired with police cuts, leads to degradation of transit quality as it is overrun by homeless drug addicts while the rich use Uber
Universal childcare – can be done well but is primarily a rich person concern. The poor family making $30k per year each at their jobs might as well have a home parent for their 3 kids under 5. They mostly want cash. It’s high income people who really want the labor intensive childcare required for the 0-5 gap in government childcare provision. That’s why the proposal emphasizes universal.
This is a bit of a mid-read. New Yorkers didn’t point to Fritz Hollings or Ben Nelson and think “hey, they really get us out there!” As long as there has been city and country, one has been suspicious of the other. How that shakes out in two party coalitions is particular to the situation.
For every mamdani on the left there is 1000 regressive and virulently reactionary rural mayors.